Bayern Munich’s Joshua Kimmich and his enforced Belastungssteuerung

Bayern Munich’s undroppable Joshua Kimmich is on enforced rest this weekend after his double yellow cards against VfL Wolfsburg. A bit of Belastungssteuerung for ol’ Josh, as the Germans say (hat tip to Derek Rae)!

How does Kimmich feel about this rare chance for R&R? For that matter, how does the quite indefatigable midfielder manage all that playing time? Well, let’s check all the way back to an interview Kimmich did with Tz from before the season started.

“I’m someone who is extremely excited when you can play more and have to train less,” Kimmich said. “For the coach, it would certainly be nicer the other way around if you could pack more content into the units.”

At Bayern, Kimmich has his fitness coach and friend Tim Lobinger to lean on for guidance. Their training is dictated by Bayern’s hectic schedule, with keeping Josh fresh and fit in mind.

“It’s always a mix of stability, stretching, upper-body and leg strength, and quickness,” Kimmich described. “In preparation, we also do some running school and coordination. Regardless of being a coach, Tim is a good friend to me. Instead of sitting in the coffee shop for two hours and talking, we go to the weight room and do something on the side. It doesn’t feel like work. It’s just a cool relationship.”

As for the enforced time off, red cards aren’t the only way to get Kimmich there.

“That’s also made easier by my kids, because I don’t have as much time on a day off to do additional training,” said Kimmich — who generally doesn’t enforce his own work breaks. “In the past, I would get bored and say, ‘Come on, you can do something now: Come on, now you can do something else.’ That’s different now.”

Kimmich now has three children, which is enough to drive anybody up a wall — just ask Marie Kondo. Somehow, the Bayern maestro still finds time to get his beauty sleep.

“They sleep well, which is why we get relatively much rest at night. The children actually almost cause us to sleep more, because we go to bed exhausted in the evening,” Kimmich said. “It can sometimes be that we sleep at 10 pm and are awake again at 7 am. Sometimes that’s better than being out by ourselves on the weekend. The kids give us a good rhythm.”

And what about technology? Julian Nagelsmann and fitness coach Holger Broich have incorporated some modern data monitoring into their routines, and the DFB has proven no less tech savvy. Germany players apparently were provided with a sleep monitoring band — but that proved a bit much.

“For a while I wore [it] a lot, until at some point I imagined that I was sleeping worse with it than before,” Kimmich explained with a grin. “Because I was too worried about the records and data being good!”

Get rest, Josh! The Bavarians will have to soldier on without him this Saturday when they host VfL Bochum. But if there’s a silver lining to this, it’s that Kimmich should be all the fresher for the Champions League clash on Tuesday at Paris Saint-Germain.